Paper, Plastic Or Republican?

One Race That's Not in the Bag

BENTONVILLE, Ark. -- In the end days of his campaign for governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, the Republican, is bagging groceries. It is something to see.

The former congressman and George W. Bush appointee does this two or three times a day, speeding from one supermarket to the next in his big red pickup, his young driver hauling down the highways like a NASCAR racer on Mama's diet pills.

To get the voters excited about his promise to end the state sales tax on food (and more to the point, to get them excited about Asa), Hutchinson dons an apron, stands in the checkout line and stuffs sacks. He jokes that "depending on how things go in the election, I might be back."

He is kidding -- sorta. If you believe 18 of the last 20 polls, Hutchinson is running behind his Democratic opponent, veteran state senator and attorney general Mike Beebe, who in two decades in political office in Arkansas has not only never lost a race, he's never faced an opponent .

It was not supposed to be this way. That Hutchinson is fighting for his political life seems a signal of the Bush administration's problems with the electorate.

Hutchinson, 55, possesses a résumé most politicians can only dream about. The man was the youngest U.S. attorney -- ever . He personally put on a flak jacket to end a siege by a crazed coven of white supremacists. He was elected to Congress thrice, before Bush tapped him to head the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he battled the scourge of rural America, methamphetamine. After 9/11, he was unanimously confirmed by the Senate as undersecretary of homeland security, to oversee borders and transportation.

"Yet all the things that two years ago looked like advantages have become liabilities," says political scientist Janine Parry, director of the Arkansas Poll at the University of Arkansas.

Bush's approval rating here is now in the dumpster at 36 percent. "So running as a strong law-and-order executive with border credentials, and having worked for an administration that has tied itself to security? Suddenly, it's not a selling point," Parry says. "If I were him, it would just be making me nuts."

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"Careful not to smush them eggs!" This advice is from Mike Huckabee, the current governor, who comes by one of the supermarket appearances in Little Rock for a photo-op with Hutchinson. "You put the bread and the eggs on the bottom? That's a way to lose votes."

Hutchinson says a few words to the half-dozen reporters about the food tax. (He wants to eliminate it immediately; his opponent wants to phase it out.) Afterward, in the mini-scrum, Huckabee is asked . . . about his knee.

The two-term Republican governor and Baptist minister, who is exploring a run for president, is famous for having lost 110 pounds after he was diagnosed with diabetes. He trained for months for yesterday's New York City Marathon. "I've had to have it drained twice," Huckabee says about the knee. "Like changing the oil."